G. K. CHESTERTON
THE WISDOM
OF FATHER BROWN
To
LUCIAN OLDERSHAW
ONE
The Absence of Mr Glass
THE consulting-rooms of Dr Orion Hood, the eminent criminologist
and specialist in certain moral disorders, lay along the sea-front
at Scarborough, in a series of very large and well-lighted french windows,
which showed the North Sea like one endless outer wall of blue-green marble.
In such a place the sea had something of the monotony of a blue-green dado:
for the chambers themselves were ruled throughout by a terrible tidiness
not unlike the terrible tidiness of the sea. It must not be supposed
that Dr Hood's apartments excluded luxury, or even poetry.
These things were there, in their place; but one felt that
they were never allowed out of their place. Luxury was there:
there stood upon a special table eight or ten boxes of the best cigars;
but they were built upon a plan so that the strongest were always
nearest the wall and the mildest nearest the window. A tantalus
containing three kinds of spirit, all of a liqueur excellence,
stood always on this table of luxury; but the fanciful have asserted
that the whisky, brandy, and rum seemed always to stand at the same level.
Poetry was there: the left-hand corner of the room was lined with
as complete a set of English classics as the right hand could show
of English and foreign physiologists. But if one took a volume
of Chaucer or Shelley from that rank, its absence irritated the mind
like a gap in a man's front teeth. One could not say the books
were never read; probably they were, but there was a sense of their
being chained to their places, like the Bibles in the old churches.
Dr Hood treated his private book-shelf as if it were a public library.
And if this strict scientific intangibility steeped even the shelves
laden with lyrics and ballads and the tables laden with drink and tobacco,
it goes without saying that yet more of such heathen holiness
protected the other shelves that held the specialist's library,
and the other tables that sustained the frail and even fairylike
instruments of chemistry or mechanics.
Dr Hood paced the length of his string of apartments, bounded--
as the boys' geographies say--on the east by the North Sea and on the west
by the serried ranks of his sociological and criminologist library.
He was clad in an artist's velvet, but with none of an artist's negligence;
his hair was heavily shot with grey, but growing thick and healthy;
his face was lean, but sanguine and expectant. Everything about him
and his room indicated something at once rigid and restless,
like that great northern sea by which (on pure principles of hygiene)
he had built his home.
Fate, being in a funny mood, pushed the door open and
introduced into those long, strict, sea-flanked apartments
one who was perhaps the most startling opposite of them and their master.
In answer to a curt but civil summons, the door opened inwards
and there shambled into the room a shapeless little figure,
which seemed to find its own hat and umbrella as unmanageable as
a mass of luggage. The umbrella was a black and prosaic bundle
long past repair; the hat was a broad-curved black hat, clerical
but not common in England; the man was the very embodiment of all
that is homely and helpless.
The doctor regarded the new-comer with a restrained astonishment,
not unlike that he would have shown if some huge but obviously
harmless sea-beast had crawled into his room. The new-comer
regarded the doctor with that beaming but breathless geniality
which characterizes a corpulent charwoman who has just managed
to stuff herself into an omnibus. It is a rich confusion of
social self-congratulation and bodily disarray. His hat tumbled
to the carpet, his heavy umbrella slipped between his knees with a thud;
he reached after the one and ducked after the other, but with
an unimpaired smile on his round face spoke simultaneously as follows:
"My name is Brown. Pray excuse me. I've come about
that business of the MacNabs. I have heard, you often help people
out of such troubles. Pray excuse me if I am wrong."
By this time he had sprawlingly recovered the hat, and made
an odd little bobbing bow over it, as if setting everything quite right.
"I hardly understand you," replied the scientist, with
a cold intensity of manner. "I fear you have mistaken the chambers.
I am Dr Hood, and my work is almost entirely literary and educational.
It is true that I have sometimes been consulted by the police
in cases of peculiar difficulty and importance, but--"
"Oh, this is of the greatest importance," broke in the little man
called Brown. "Why, her mother won't let them get engaged."
And he leaned back in his chair in radiant rationality.
The brows of Dr Hood were drawn down darkly, but the eyes
under them were bright with something that might be anger or
might be amusement. "And still," he said, "I do not quite understand."
"You see, they want to get married," said the man with the
clerical hat. "Maggie MacNab and young Todhunter want to get married.
Now, what can be more important than that?"
The great Orion Hood's scientific triumphs had deprived him
of many things--some said of his health, others of his God;
but they had not wholly despoiled him of his sense of the absurd.
At the last plea of the ingenuous priest a chuckle broke out of him
from inside, and he threw himself into an arm-chair in an ironical attitude
of the consulting physician.
"Mr Brown," he said gravely, "it is quite fourteen and a half years
since I was personally asked to test a personal problem: then it was
the case of an attempt to poison the French President at
a Lord Mayor's Banquet. It is now, I understand, a question of whether
some friend of yours called Maggie is a suitable fiancee for some friend
of hers called Todhunter. Well, Mr Brown, I am a sportsman.
I will take it on. I will give the MacNab family my best advice,
as good as I gave the French Republic and the King of England--no, better:
fourteen years better. I have nothing else to do this afternoon.
Tell me your story."
The little clergyman called Brown thanked him with
unquestionable warmth, but still with a queer kind of simplicity.
It was rather as if he were thanking a stranger in a smoking-room
for some trouble in passing the matches, than as if he were (as he was)
practically thanking the Curator of Kew Gardens for coming with him
into a field to find a four-leaved clover. With scarcely a semi-colon
after his hearty thanks, the little man began his recital:
"I told you my name was Brown; well, that's the fact,
and I'm the priest of the little Catholic Church I dare say you've seen
beyond those straggly streets, where the town ends towards the north.
In the last and straggliest of those streets which runs along the sea
like a sea-wall there is a very honest but rather sharp-tempered
member of my flock, a widow called MacNab. She has one daughter,
and she lets lodgings, and between her and the daughter,
and between her and the lodgers--well, I dare say there is a great deal
to be said on both sides. At present she has only one lodger,
the young man called Todhunter; but he has given more trouble
than all the rest, for he wants to marry the young woman of the house."
"And the young woman of the house," asked Dr Hood, with huge and
silent amusement, "what does she want?"
"Why, she wants to marry him," cried Father Brown, sitting up eagerly.
"That is just the awful complication."
"It is indeed a hideous enigma," said Dr Hood.
"This young James Todhunter," continued the cleric,
"is a very decent man so far as I know; but then nobody knows very much.
He is a bright, brownish little fellow, agile like a monkey,
clean-shaven like an actor, and obliging like a born courtier.
He seems to have quite a pocketful of money, but nobody knows what
his trade is. Mrs MacNab, therefore (being of a pessimistic turn),
is quite sure it is something dreadful, and probably connected with dynamite.
The dynamite must be of a shy and noiseless sort, for the poor fellow
only shuts himself up for several hours of the day and studies something
behind a locked door. He declares his privacy is temporary and justified,
and promises to explain before the wedding. That is all that anyone knows
for certain, but Mrs MacNab will tell you a great deal more than
even she is certain of. You know how the tales grow like grass on
such a patch of ignorance as that. There are tales of two voices
heard talking in the room; though, when the door is opened,
Todhunter is always found alone. There are tales of a mysterious
tall man in a silk hat, who once came out of the sea-mists and
apparently out of the sea, stepping softly across the sandy fields and
through the small back garden at twilight, till he was heard
talking to the lodger at his open window. The colloquy seemed to end
in a quarrel. Todhunter dashed down his window with violence,
and the man in the high hat melted into the sea-fog again.
This story is told by the family with the fiercest mystification;
but I really think Mrs MacNab prefers her own original tale:
that the Other Man (or whatever it is) crawls out every night from the
big box in the corner, which is kept locked all day. You see,
therefore, how this sealed door of Todhunter's is treated as the gate
of all the fancies and monstrosities of the `Thousand and One Nights'.
And yet there is the little fellow in his respectable black jacket,
as punctual and innocent as a parlour clock. He pays his rent to the tick;
he is practically a teetotaller; he is tirelessly kind with
the younger children, and can keep them amused for a day on end; and,
last and most urgent of all, he has made himself equally popular with
the eldest daughter, who is ready to go to church with him tomorrow."
A man warmly concerned with any large theories has always
a relish for applying them to any triviality. The great specialist
having condescended to the priest's simplicity, condescended expansively.
He settled himself with comfort in his arm-chair and began to talk in
the tone of a somewhat absent-minded lecturer:
"Even in a minute instance, it is best to look first to
the main tendencies of Nature. A particular flower may not be dead
in early winter, but the flowers are dying; a particular pebble
may never be wetted with the tide, but the tide is coming in.
To the scientific eye all human history is a series of collective movements,
destructions or migrations, like the massacre of flies in winter
or the return of birds in spring. Now the root fact in all history is Race.
Race produces religion; Race produces legal and ethical wars.
There is no stronger case than that of the wild, unworldly and
perishing stock which we commonly call the Celts, of whom your friends
the MacNabs are specimens. Small, swarthy, and of this dreamy and
drifting blood, they accept easily the superstitious explanation of
any incidents, just as they still accept (you will excuse me for saying)
that superstitious explanation of all incidents which you
and your Church represent. It is not remarkable that such people,
with the sea moaning behind them and the Church (excuse me again)
droning in front of them, should put fantastic features into what are
probably plain events. You, with your small parochial responsibilities,
see only this particular Mrs MacNab, terrified with this particular tale
of two voices and a tall man out of the sea. But the man with
the scientific imagination sees, as it were, the whole clans of MacNab
scattered over the whole world, in its ultimate average as uniform
as a tribe of birds. He sees thousands of Mrs MacNabs,
in thousands of houses, dropping their little drop of morbidity
in the tea-cups of their friends; he sees--"
Before the scientist could conclude his sentence, another and
more impatient summons sounded from without; someone with swishing skirts
was marshalled hurriedly down the corridor, and the door opened on
a young girl, decently dressed but disordered and red-hot with haste.
She had sea-blown blonde hair, and would have been entirely beautiful
if her cheek-bones had not been, in the Scotch manner, a little
high in relief as well as in colour. Her apology was almost as abrupt
as a command.
"I'm sorry to interrupt you, sir," she said, "but I had to follow
Father Brown at once; it's nothing less than life or death."
Father Brown began to get to his feet in some disorder.
"Why, what has happened, Maggie?" he said.
"James has been murdered, for all I can make out,"
answered the girl, still breathing hard from her rush. "That man Glass
has been with him again; I heard them talking through the door quite plain.
Two separate voices: for James speaks low, with a burr,
and the other voice was high and quavery."
"That man Glass?" repeated the priest in some perplexity.
"I know his name is Glass," answered the girl, in great impatience.
"I heard it through the door. They were quarrelling--about money,
I think--for I heard James say again and again, `That's right, Mr Glass,'
or `No, Mr Glass,' and then, `Two or three, Mr Glass.' But we're talking
too much; you must come at once, and there may be time yet."
"But time for what?" asked Dr Hood, who had been studying
the young lady with marked interest. "What is there about Mr Glass
and his money troubles that should impel such urgency?"
"I tried to break down the door and couldn't," answered the girl shortly,
"Then I ran to the back-yard, and managed to climb on to the window-sill
that looks into the room. It was an dim, and seemed to be empty,
but I swear I saw James lying huddled up in a corner, as if he were
drugged or strangled."
"This is very serious," said Father Brown, gathering his errant hat
and umbrella and standing up; "in point of fact I was just putting
your case before this gentleman, and his view--"
"Has been largely altered," said the scientist gravely.
"I do not think this young lady is so Celtic as I had supposed.
As I have nothing else to do, I will put on my hat and stroll
down town with you."
In a few minutes all three were approaching the dreary tail of
the MacNabs' street: the girl with the stern and breathless stride
of the mountaineer, the criminologist with a lounging grace (which was
not without a certain leopard-like swiftness), and the priest at an
energetic trot entirely devoid of distinction. The aspect of this
edge of the town was not entirely without justification for
the doctor's hints about desolate moods and environments.
The scattered houses stood farther and farther apart in a broken string
along the seashore; the afternoon was closing with a premature and
partly lurid twilight; the sea was of an inky purple and murmuring ominously.
In the scrappy back garden of the MacNabs which ran down towards the sand,
two black, barren-looking trees stood up like demon hands held up
in astonishment, and as Mrs MacNab ran down the street to meet them
with lean hands similarly spread, and her fierce face in shadow,
she was a little like a demon herself. The doctor and the priest
made scant reply to her shrill reiterations of her daughter's story,
with more disturbing details of her own, to the divided vows of vengeance
against Mr Glass for murdering, and against Mr Todhunter for being murdered,
or against the latter for having dared to want to marry her daughter,
and for not having lived to do it. They passed through the narrow passage
in the front of the house until they came to the lodger's door at the back,
and there Dr Hood, with the trick of an old detective, put his shoulder
sharply to the panel and burst in the door.
It opened on a scene of silent catastrophe. No one seeing it,
even for a flash, could doubt that the room had been the theatre
of some thrilling collision between two, or perhaps more, persons.
Playing-cards lay littered across the table or fluttered about
the floor as if a game had been interrupted. Two wine glasses stood
ready for wine on a side-table, but a third lay smashed
in a star of crystal upon the carpet. A few feet from it lay
what looked like a long knife or short sword, straight,
but with an ornamental and pictured handle, its dull blade just caught
a grey glint from the dreary window behind, which showed the black trees
against the leaden level of the sea. Towards the opposite corner
of the room was rolled a gentleman's silk top hat, as if it had
just been knocked off his head; so much so, indeed, that one almost looked
to see it still rolling. And in the corner behind it, thrown like a sack
of potatoes, but corded like a railway trunk, lay Mr James Todhunter,
with a scarf across his mouth, and six or seven ropes knotted round
his elbows and ankles. His brown eyes were alive and shifted alertly.
Dr Orion Hood paused for one instant on the doormat and drank in
the whole scene of voiceless violence. Then he stepped swiftly
across the carpet, picked up the tall silk hat, and gravely put it
upon the head of the yet pinioned Todhunter. It was so much too large
for him that it almost slipped down on to his shoulders.
"Mr Glass's hat," said the doctor, returning with it and peering
into the inside with a pocket lens. "How to explain the absence
of Mr Glass and the presence of Mr Glass's hat? For Mr Glass is not a
careless man with his clothes. That hat is of a stylish shape and
systematically brushed and burnished, though not very new.
An old dandy, I should think."
"But, good heavens!" called out Miss MacNab, "aren't you going to
untie the man first?"
"I say `old' with intention, though not with certainty"
continued the expositor; "my reason for it might seem a little far-fetched.
The hair of human beings falls out in very varying degrees,
but almost always falls out slightly, and with the lens I should see
the tiny hairs in a hat recently worn. It has none, which leads me
to guess that Mr Glass is bald. Now when this is taken with
the high-pitched and querulous voice which Miss MacNab described
so vividly (patience, my dear lady, patience), when we take
the hairless head together with the tone common in senile anger,
I should think we may deduce some advance in years. Nevertheless,
he was probably vigorous, and he was almost certainly tall.
I might rely in some degree on the story of his previous appearance
at the window, as a tall man in a silk hat, but I think I have
more exact indication. This wineglass has been smashed all over the place,
but one of its splinters lies on the high bracket beside the mantelpiece.
No such fragment could have fallen there if the vessel had been smashed
in the hand of a comparatively short man like Mr Todhunter."
"By the way," said Father Brown, "might it not be as well
to untie Mr Todhunter?"
"Our lesson from the drinking-vessels does not end here,"
proceeded the specialist. "I may say at once that it is possible
that the man Glass was bald or nervous through dissipation rather than age.
Mr Todhunter, as has been remarked, is a quiet thrifty gentleman,
essentially an abstainer. These cards and wine-cups are no part
of his normal habit; they have been produced for a particular companion.
But, as it happens, we may go farther. Mr Todhunter may or may not
possess this wine-service, but there is no appearance of his
possessing any wine. What, then, were these vessels to contain?
I would at once suggest some brandy or whisky, perhaps of a luxurious sort,
from a flask in the pocket of Mr Glass. We have thus something like
a picture of the man, or at least of the type: tall, elderly, fashionable,
but somewhat frayed, certainly fond of play and strong waters,
perhaps rather too fond of them Mr Glass is a gentleman not unknown
on the fringes of society."
"Look here," cried the young woman, "if you don't let me pass to
untie him I'll run outside and scream for the police."
"I should not advise you, Miss MacNab," said Dr Hood gravely,
"to be in any hurry to fetch the police. Father Brown,
I seriously ask you to compose your flock, for their sakes, not for mine.
Well, we have seen something of the figure and quality of Mr Glass;
what are the chief facts known of Mr Todhunter? They are substantially three:
that he is economical, that he is more or less wealthy, and that
he has a secret. Now, surely it is obvious that there are
the three chief marks of the kind of man who is blackmailed.
And surely it is equally obvious that the faded finery,
the profligate habits, and the shrill irritation of Mr Glass
are the unmistakable marks of the kind of man who blackmails him.
We have the two typical figures of a tragedy of hush money:
on the one hand, the respectable man with a mystery; on the other,
the West-end vulture with a scent for a mystery. These two men
have met here today and have quarrelled, using blows and a bare weapon."
"Are you going to take those ropes off?" asked the girl stubbornly.
Dr Hood replaced the silk hat carefully on the side table,
and went across to the captive. He studied him intently,
even moving him a little and half-turning him round by the shoulders,
but he only answered:
"No; I think these ropes will do very well till your friends
the police bring the handcuffs."
Father Brown, who had been looking dully at the carpet,
lifted his round face and said: "What do you mean?"
The man of science had picked up the peculiar dagger-sword
from the carpet and was examining it intently as he answered:
"Because you find Mr Todhunter tied up," he said, "you all jump
to the conclusion that Mr Glass had tied him up; and then, I suppose,
escaped. There are four objections to this: First, why should a gentleman
so dressy as our friend Glass leave his hat behind him, if he left
of his own free will? Second," he continued, moving towards the window,
"this is the only exit, and it is locked on the inside. Third, this
blade here has a tiny touch of blood at the point, but there is
no wound on Mr Todhunter. Mr Glass took that wound away with him,
dead or alive. Add to all this primary probability.
It is much more likely that the blackmailed person would try to kill
his incubus, rather than that the blackmailer would try to kill
the goose that lays his golden egg. There, I think, we have
a pretty complete story."
"But the ropes?" inquired the priest, whose eyes had remained
open with a rather vacant admiration.
"Ah, the ropes," said the expert with a singular intonation.
"Miss MacNab very much wanted to know why I did not set Mr Todhunter
free from his ropes. Well, I will tell her. I did not do it because
Mr Todhunter can set himself free from them at any minute he chooses."
"What?" cried the audience on quite different notes of astonishment.
"I have looked at all the knots on Mr Todhunter," reiterated Hood
quietly. "I happen to know something about knots; they are quite
a branch of criminal science. Every one of those knots he has
made himself and could loosen himself; not one of them would have been made
by an enemy really trying to pinion him. The whole of this affair
of the ropes is a clever fake, to make us think him the victim of
the struggle instead of the wretched Glass, whose corpse may be hidden
in the garden or stuffed up the chimney."
There was a rather depressed silence; the room was darkening,
the sea-blighted boughs of the garden trees looked leaner and
blacker than ever, yet they seemed to have come nearer to the window.
One could almost fancy they were sea-monsters like krakens or cuttlefish,
writhing polypi who had crawled up from the sea to see the end
of this tragedy, even as he, the villain and victim of it,
the terrible man in the tall hat, had once crawled up from the sea.
For the whole air was dense with the morbidity of blackmail, which is
the most morbid of human things, because it is a crime concealing a crime;
a black plaster on a blacker wound.
The face of the little Catholic priest, which was commonly complacent
and even comic, had suddenly become knotted with a curious frown.
It was not the blank curiosity of his first innocence. It was rather
that creative curiosity which comes when a man has the beginnings of
an idea. "Say it again, please," he said in a simple, bothered manner;
"do you mean that Todhunter can tie himself up all alone and
untie himself all alone?"
"That is what I mean," said the doctor.
"Jerusalem!" ejaculated Brown suddenly, "I wonder if it could
possibly be that!"
He scuttled across the room rather like a rabbit, and peered with
quite a new impulsiveness into the partially-covered face of the captive.
Then he turned his own rather fatuous face to the company.
"Yes, that's it!" he cried in a certain excitement. "Can't you see it
in the man's face? Why, look at his eyes!"
Both the Professor and the girl followed the direction of his glance.
And though the broad black scarf completely masked the lower half
of Todhunter's visage, they did grow conscious of something struggling
and intense about the upper part of it.
"His eyes do look queer," cried the young woman, strongly moved.
"You brutes; I believe it's hurting him!"
"Not that, I think," said Dr Hood; "the eyes have certainly
a singular expression. But I should interpret those transverse
wrinkles as expressing rather such slight psychological abnormality--"
"Oh, bosh!" cried Father Brown: "can't you see he's laughing?"
"Laughing!" repeated the doctor, with a start; "but what on earth
can he be laughing at?"
"Well," replied the Reverend Brown apologetically,
"not to put too fine a point on it, I think he is laughing at you.
And indeed, I'm a little inclined to laugh at myself, now I know about it."
"Now you know about what?" asked Hood, in some exasperation.
"Now I know," replied the priest, "the profession of Mr Todhunter."
He shuffled about the room, looking at one object after another
with what seemed to be a vacant stare, and then invariably bursting
into an equally vacant laugh, a highly irritating process for those
who had to watch it. He laughed very much over the hat,
still more uproariously over the broken glass, but the blood on
the sword point sent him into mortal convulsions of amusement.
Then he turned to the fuming specialist.
"Dr Hood," he cried enthusiastically, "you are a great poet!
You have called an uncreated being out of the void. How much more godlike
that is than if you had only ferreted out the mere facts!
Indeed, the mere facts are rather commonplace and comic by comparison."
"I have no notion what you are talking about," said Dr Hood
rather haughtily; "my facts are all inevitable, though necessarily incomplete.
A place may be permitted to intuition, perhaps (or poetry if you
prefer the term), but only because the corresponding details cannot
as yet be ascertained. In the absence of Mr Glass--"
"That's it, that's it," said the little priest, nodding quite eagerly,
"that's the first idea to get fixed; the absence of Mr Glass.
He is so extremely absent. I suppose," he added reflectively,
"that there was never anybody so absent as Mr Glass."
"Do you mean he is absent from the town?" demanded the doctor.
"I mean he is absent from everywhere," answered Father Brown;
"he is absent from the Nature of Things, so to speak."
"Do you seriously mean," said the specialist with a smile,
"that there is no such person?"
The priest made a sign of assent. "It does seem a pity," he said.
Orion Hood broke into a contemptuous laugh. "Well," he said,
"before we go on to the hundred and one other evidences, let us take
the first proof we found; the first fact we fell over when we fell
into this room. If there is no Mr Glass, whose hat is this?"
"It is Mr Todhunter's," replied Father Brown.
"But it doesn't fit him," cried Hood impatiently. "He couldn't
possibly wear it!"
Father Brown shook his head with ineffable mildness.
"I never said he could wear it," he answered. "I said it was his hat.
Or, if you insist on a shade of difference, a hat that is his."
"And what is the shade of difference?" asked the criminologist
with a slight sneer.
"My good sir," cried the mild little man, with his first movement
akin to impatience, "if you will walk down the street to the nearest
hatter's shop, you will see that there is, in common speech,
a difference between a man's hat and the hats that are his."
"But a hatter," protested Hood, "can get money out of his
stock of new hats. What could Todhunter get out of this one old hat?"
"Rabbits," replied Father Brown promptly.
"What?" cried Dr Hood.
"Rabbits, ribbons, sweetmeats, goldfish, rolls of coloured paper,"
said the reverend gentleman with rapidity. "Didn't you see it all
when you found out the faked ropes? It's just the same with the sword.
Mr Todhunter hasn't got a scratch on him, as you say; but he's got
a scratch in him, if you follow me."
"Do you mean inside Mr Todhunter's clothes?" inquired
Mrs MacNab sternly.
"I do not mean inside Mr Todhunter's clothes," said Father Brown.
"I mean inside Mr Todhunter."
"Well, what in the name of Bedlam do you mean?"
"Mr Todhunter," explained Father Brown placidly, "is learning
to be a professional conjurer, as well as juggler, ventriloquist,
and expert in the rope trick. The conjuring explains the hat.
It is without traces of hair, not because it is worn by
the prematurely bald Mr Glass, but because it has never been worn
by anybody. The juggling explains the three glasses, which Todhunter
was teaching himself to throw up and catch in rotation.
But, being only at the stage of practice, he smashed one glass
against the ceiling. And the juggling also explains the sword,
which it was Mr Todhunter's professional pride and duty to swallow.
But, again, being at the stage of practice, he very slightly grazed
the inside of his throat with the weapon. Hence he has a wound
inside him, which I am sure (from the expression on his face)
is not a serious one. He was also practising the trick of
a release from ropes, like the Davenport Brothers, and he was just about
to free himself when we all burst into the room. The cards, of course,
are for card tricks, and they are scattered on the floor because
he had just been practising one of those dodges of sending them
flying through the air. He merely kept his trade secret,
because he had to keep his tricks secret, like any other conjurer.
But the mere fact of an idler in a top hat having once looked in
at his back window, and been driven away by him with great indignation,
was enough to set us all on a wrong track of romance, and make us imagine
his whole life overshadowed by the silk-hatted spectre of Mr Glass."
"But What about the two voices?" asked Maggie, staring.
"Have you never heard a ventriloquist?" asked Father Brown.
"Don't you know they speak first in their natural voice, and then
answer themselves in just that shrill, squeaky, unnatural voice
that you heard?"
There was a long silence, and Dr Hood regarded the little man
who had spoken with a dark and attentive smile. "You are certainly
a very ingenious person," he said; "it could not have been done better
in a book. But there is just one part of Mr Glass you have not succeeded
in explaining away, and that is his name. Miss MacNab distinctly
heard him so addressed by Mr Todhunter."
The Rev. Mr Brown broke into a rather childish giggle.
"Well, that," he said, "that's the silliest part of the whole silly story.
When our juggling friend here threw up the three glasses in turn,
he counted them aloud as he caught them, and also commented aloud
when he failed to catch them. What he really said was: `One, two
and three--missed a glass one, two--missed a glass.' And so on."
There was a second of stillness in the room, and then everyone
with one accord burst out laughing. As they did so the figure
in the corner complacently uncoiled all the ropes and let them fall
with a flourish. Then, advancing into the middle of the room with a bow,
he produced from his pocket a big bill printed in blue and red,
which announced that ZALADIN, the World's Greatest Conjurer,
Contortionist, Ventriloquist and Human Kangaroo would be ready
with an entirely new series of Tricks at the Empire Pavilion,
Scarborough, on Monday next at eight o'clock precisely.
